Recalled to Life eBook

CHAPTER VII.

THE GRANGE AT WOODBURY

I stopped for three weeks in Jane’s lodgings;
and before the end of that time, Jane and I had got
upon the most intimate footing. It was partly
her kindliness that endeared her to me, and her constant
sense of continuity with the earlier days which I had
quite forgotten; but it was partly too, I felt sure,
a vague revival within my own breast of a familiarity
that had long ago subsisted between us. I was
coming to myself again, on one side of my nature.
Day by day I grew more certain that while facts had
passed away from me, appropriate emotions remained
vaguely present. Among the Woodbury people that
I met, I recognised none to say that I knew them;
but I knew almost at first sight that I liked this
one and disliked that one. And in every case
alike, when I talked the matter over afterwards with
Jane, she confirmed my suspicion that in my First
State I had liked or disliked just those persons respectively.
My brain was upset, but my heart remained precisely
the same as ever.

On my second morning I went up to The Grange with
her. The house was still unlet. Since the
day of the murder, nobody cared to live in it.
The garden and shrubbery had been sadly neglected:
Jane took me out of the way as we walked up the path,
to show me the place where the photographic apparatus
had been found embedded in the grass, and where the
murderer had cut his hands getting over the wall in
his frantic agitation. The wall was pretty high
and protected with bottle-glass. I guessed he
must have been tall to scramble over it. That
seemed to tell against Jane’s crude idea that
a woman might have done it.

But when I said so to Jane, she met me at once with
the crushing reply: “Perhaps it wasn’t
the same person that came back for the box.”
I saw she was right again. I had jumped at a conclusion.
In cases like this, one must leave no hypothesis untried,
jump at no conclusions of any sort. Clearly,
that woman ought to have been made a detective.

As I entered the house the weird sense of familiarity
that pursued me throughout rose to a very high pitch.
I couldn’t fairly say, indeed, that I remembered
the different rooms. All I could say with certainty
was that I had seen them before. To this there
were three exceptions—­the three that belonged
to my Second State—­the library, my bedroom,
and the hall and staircase. The first was indelibly
printed on my memory as a component part of the Picture,
and I found my recollection of every object in the
room almost startling in its correctness. Only,
there was an alcove on one side that I’d quite
forgotten, and I saw why most clearly. I stood
with my back to it as I looked at the Picture.
The other two bits I remembered as the room in which
I had had my first great illness, and the passage down
which I had been carried or helped when I was taken
to Aunt Emma’s.